Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

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Hello everybody.

I'm Ray Gildow and welcome to Lakeland Currents, and I have with me this evening a guest who has been here for many, many times.

Dan Hagstead was the station manager on the Brainerd studio for 20 some years.

What did you say Dan?

24 years.

24 years and he's back now as a unique producer of videos and welcome back Dan, it's good to see you.

It's good to see that you're still in the video production business.

I enjoyed being on the other side of the cameras.

I was here for all your shows that you did over the years.

A little different being on this side.

Yeah.

So tell us what you're doing now.

So I got into doing video work, I'm a creative guy who's always been a photographer, even back in the Kodachrome days and then video cameras became affordable and it's such a great way to tell a story.

So I got into doing video mostly for fun, turned into a little business and it's turned into a pretty good little business in retirement.

So, I've enjoyed that very much.

Back in the day you'd need a, well this just wasn't doable by a person, but now with the equipment has become so affordable, the computers are so robust, I can do what I do for a very reasonable price.

So I do a lot of work for nonprofits, small businesses, that could never have dreamed of doing video before but now they can.

How do you keep yourself up to date with the technology?

It's impossible, but I buy equipment that is two years old.

There are people out there who have to have the latest and greatest, so I buy used equipment that's still just excellent.

My main camera, well I use a GoPro nowadays for a lot of things, even a cell.

Yeah even the cell phones shoot great video, but my main video I use for most work, my main camera is a Panasonic Lumix GH-5.

It shoots 4K video, the stabilization is just unreal.

That camera body and a lens is a couple thousand dollars used and it's just remarkable quality and you can record good audio with it and you got to have good audio to get good video.

So yeah yeah.

So you have a big project that you did actually with Lakeland Public TV you want to talk a little bit about.

Yeah it was, I've lived in Brainerd for many years and this was a railroad town for the first hundred years of Brainerd it was Northern Pacific everything.

A lot of people don't remember that cuz that was, it's been gone for 50 years.

I like history and so I was at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth in 2015 and I wanted to buy the DVD on the history of the Northern Pacific.

They didn't have it, they couldn't find it, near as I could tell nobody's ever made it.

So working at Lakeland, I went to Jeff Hanks our production manager at the time, now the general manager, and said you guys should make this video and because there's a unit that produces documentaries and they agreed it was a good idea.

But by the time I retired, six, seven years later, they hadn't gotten around to it which I understand it's a huge project.

So I went to them and said okay I'm retired now how about if you can get some grant money I'll make this video, and so they applied for a grant for the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and I'm funded.

And like I said I don't need tons of money.

This would have been just undoable, but for a reasonable amount they said go for it and there you go.

So what do you, now what?

The dog caught the car.

Well my nephew's a train guy and he said well you got to get a hold of the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association.

Well, I'd never heard of them but I found their website, they had a phone number and I knew they'd have archives cuz most of this project is photos that you find and narratives and such.

So they had a phone number.

I called the phone number and a guy answered.

His name is Gary Tarbox, he's out in Seattle, he's a retired engineer and he knows, he's one of those that knows all and I told him what I wanted.

You know could I use your video, photos in my project and what kind of permissions do I need and he says well are you going to tell the same old story or are you going to tell the truth?

And I thought well boy did I call the right number because that's exactly what I want.

I just don't want the same old, same old.

Well, Gary's understanding was a lot of it was the way the Native Americans were treated in this whole process of building railroads, so he wanted to make sure that got in there and it is.

So we interviewed Gary online and that's in the video, and it's an interesting story.

It needs to be told.

Now that section could be a 10-hour Ken Burns documentary, but it's a few minutes in my video, but it needs to be there.

So the NHPRA was online.

I joined.

Well, by golly, just as I'm producing this they're having their National Convention here in Brainerd/Baxter.

Really.

So yeah, so I went, didn't know anybody, but I walked into the first evening's meet and greet and I saw a couple guys sitting at a table said can I sit next to you and explain and they said sure.

Well, it turns out that it's a fellow by the name of Bill Kubler and Bill is an amazing guy.

He remembers everything and an encyclopedic knowledge on the NP.

Not only that he was raised in Fargo, and as a little kid was interested in trains and the NP engineers, with his parents permission, would let him ride in the locomotives and they'd ride out to Jamestown and Mandan and back, yeah as a kid.

Wow.

So he got to talk to all these engineers.

He went on to be an airline pilot, and he said everything I learned about piloting an aircraft, I was in the Air Force and then the airline, he said I learned from these train engineers because it is so similar.

He talks a little bit about that in the documentary, but I need to get him back here and he's just all on board to that.

He came to Brainerd again, on his own dime, just to be interviewed, and wow fascinating guy.

So Bill Kubler's in there.

Then we've got from the Lake Superior Railway Museum is Ken Bueller.

So I drove over to Duluth and shot Ken on the steps of the Minnetonka and he's very, very knowledgeable.

And Jeremy Jackson who's a local historian, an archaeologist, an academic.

He knows a lot about local history.

So these people were glad to show up and be interviewed.

This particular railroad was so huge in our area.

Yes.

I remember when I was a kid, I grew up in Pine River and I can remember steamers.

They would slow down or stop in Pine River and then they would go to Brainerd and I can remember them the chug-chug-chug-chug and that's a memory you never never forget when you're a little kid to hear that kind of noise.

But we had the shops here in Brainerd and I don't know how many employees there were at one time.

Many hundreds.

I've heard many different, 5 to 700, I've heard those ranges.

It was a huge railroad town.

This was the beginning of the Northern Pacific.

Yep and Staples had a roundhouse where they did repairs and so there's a railroad history across this whole area is just absolutely huge, and there are still people today that have worked on that railroad that are still alive.

There are fewer because it's been 50 years since the Northern Pacific got merged into.

What was the range of the Northern Pacific?

The Northern Pacific eventually went from Ashland, Wisconsin up to Winnipeg, St Paul and then west across North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, basically.

Wow.

And then what happened that they merged?

Didn't they or somebody bought them out?

They did.

Let me go, let me back up.

Sure.

Let me back up.

Now this is going to sound crazy but I'm going to go back to Christopher Columbus because he... Was he here during that?

He wanted to be.

Columbus, like these other explorers, were looking for a water route to the Pacific.

Of course it wasn't there.

Later the US bought, there was the Louisiana Purchase, and Jefferson sent the Corps of Discovery, Lewis and Clark out West looking for a water route to the Pacific.

That's part of what they were supposed to do.

Obviously it wasn't there but we still needed to connect to the West Coast.

People think that technology is booming now and all AI and all these other things.

The 1840s was a huge technological boom in the world and the US.

Railroads and telegraph- the 1840s were.

They'd been invented before that but were really coming in their own at that point and entrepreneurs saw this is the future, this is where our money should be, so then there was the Civil War and they realized the importance of transportation.

Abraham Lincoln was a huge proponent of railroads because he saw it would bring the country together and politically and emotionally and just conveying information.

So they needed railroads, and particularly in the Northwest here, because now if you were paying attention in high school, you may remember the Oregon boundary dispute -5440 or fight- was something that people remember.

We didn't know where that Canadian border was going to be.

We'd been fighting a war with Texas and Mexico and France was involved and Great Britain was up here in Canada.

Where's that border going to be?

Well they finally settled on the border, the 49th parallel, but the government and particularly the Army knew that treaties are worth nothing, they're just ink on paper.

I mean look what we did with the Indians, you know, it's as long as the grass grows and some wild rivers flow or we change our mind or you find gold in the Black Hills and then the Laramie Treaty of 1850 is just forget about that, we didn't really mean that.

You can't have land unless you are there to defend it.

The Army couldn't defend that northern border unless they could get there and it took Lewis and Clark months to do it .You can't have an army do that.

They said we need a railroad and so that's why Custer was out where he was, he was defending the building of this railroad for the Army and people don't talk about that but we mentioned that in the documentary.

So all these things come together.

They needed this Northern Pacific Railway, which was chartered by Congress in the 1860s, to build a railway and telegraph line from Duluth, what's now Duluth, from Lake Superior to Puget Sound.

That was their thing.

So.

I might add that if you've not been to the museum in Duluth it's an excellent, it's unbelievable.

It's a great place to go.

I'm not a great railroad buff but I was amazed at what they had at the museum.

It's a world class railroad museum right in our backyard.

You can take train rides and everything.

So there was a guy named Jay Gregory Smith from Vermont.

His father was a railroad guy and Jay Gregory wanted to be a railroad guy.

He partnered with Jay Cooke, who has his park over by Carlton, and they're going to build this railroad, and Jay Cooke had built the Lake Superior and Mississippi which ran from Duluth or Superior down to St Paul and the day they finished with that they started building the Northern Pacific in Carlton, what they called the, what did they call it, the junction or the switch at the time and they just started building west.

Terrible place to build a railroad.

You look at the map and it's all swamps but Smith was in Vermont, he wasn't paying a lot of attention to what was going on here.

They tried their best to build a railroad across there but it you'd think it would be easy, it's flat, you build straight that's what railroaders like, but it kept sinking into who knows where and it was decades, it was into the 1900s before they had the route finally in a solid place where it is now.

It cost them, it cost them dearly, it cost them bankruptcy and it was just, it was just terrible.

It was.

So not good management, picking the wrong line, they crossed here in Brainerd because of the high bank on the Mississippi, that's the reason the town is here.

It's a good place to build a bridge and railroaders like a straight line.

So if you go, you know, pretty much straight west from Duluth you cross here.

Yeah okay.

So you got a little video here to talk about and something to do with potatoes.

Potatoes.

When I met with the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association, I talked to all these guys and they're almost all guys.

I said what made the NP unique and to a person they all said the NP was like a family, be sure and talk about how it was like a family, and I think I did that in the video.

And then they also said well you got to talk about the baked, the Great Big Baked Potato and I said what and then they told me the story of the Great Big Baked Potato and here's the segment from the video.

Hazen Titus was the head of dining cars for the NP.

He was at the western end of the line sourcing locally grown foods to add to the menu of the North Coast Limited.

He asked some local farmers what they had to offer.

When Titus came around he said what can be growing around here and his answer?

One of the things was they grow this giant Russet potato, a variety of Russet potato that weighed around 2 lbs that they'd use for cattle feed.

He said they could be cut up and cooked, but they had a hard time cooking them because they're so big.

By the time you got the center warm and cooked, the outer set was overdone.

And anyway Titus took a sack of potatoes or a couple sacks of potatoes back to St Paul and went to work on trying to cook them and figured out a way of cooking them at a lower temperature for a while and only turned up the heat for the last little bit and it became a great hit and one of the biggest advertising promotional things for the Northern Pacific dining.

And sure enough, the NP instituted something that became one of its advertising points for passenger travel, the route of the Great Big Baked Potato.

So even as late as the 1960s, if you were riding on the North Coast Limited into Seattle, for example, or on the Main Streeter, which was the name of one of their other passenger trains, you would go by the NP's commissary just before you made the stop at King Street Station and you'd look over there and on top of the commissary building was this great big giant potato with its potato eyes in it that were illuminated at night and it was quite the sight.

And they even wrote a song about the Great Big Baked Potato.

In going from Seattle I took the North Coast train because my time was limited I wish some time to gain I crossed the great Columbia where roses were in bud then wandered into dinner and there met Dr Spud Twas lying on a platter sure something just immense served with a spoon and butter and it only cost 10 cents.

It was split right up the center filled with butter and what's better it was sweet and hot and really was it good well I should stutter Oh you Great Big Baked Potato you are Irish through and through you may talk of your lobsters, clams and oysters too but just try that potato it's good for you If you want a sure thing hunch for your breakfast, dinner or lunch on the NPRR in the dining car get a Great Big Baked P-O-tato.

That was an interesting video and something I never heard of before.

Well what's fun is that that song was written 100 plus years ago.

I couldn't find a recording of it but I found a couple volunteers that would come into the studio here, Nancy Albertson and Rebecca Timmons and they recorded it.

So as far as I know that's the only recording of that song.

There's a full six-minute version that's on the Lakeland website.

Have the people from the Northern Pacific, have they seen your video?

Oh yeah.

And what's the feedback?

Every one of them, I was worried cuz these people are serious rail fans.

I mean they know stuff, you got to get it right.

On the other hand this could be a 20-hour film to cover it all, so they're on one shoulder as I'm editing.

The other shoulder I'm kind of making it for me and just regular folks too.

But I had enough good information that I could go to 90 minutes.

So I went to Meghan, I said I could go 90 minutes with this, is that okay?

Yeah, okay, and that's what the wonder of public television is that they can be flexible.

Who else is going to tell this story?

So thank you to Lakeland and Meghan and everybody for doing that.

So, I think I found the right balance.

I found my experts, thinking of Bill Kubler, he does not, he tells it like it is, and he said he liked it.

That's a big deal.

My daughter-in-law is 40 something busy teacher and she said I actually watched it and I actually liked it and I think because she probably never heard of the Northern Pacific, doesn't really care about railroads and that, but I apparently, we were able to make it interesting for just everybody.

Well, just to finish that thought about what did they merge, how did that merger come?

How did that merge, well we need to talk about James J Hill real quickly.

He's the guy who started the Great Northern and he's the hero who really saved things because he was a smart, smart business guy.

He thought short term, he thought longterm and he made stuff happen.

He was really smart so he started buying up Northern Pacific stock, cuz he knew it was a good railroad, after the second bankruptcy, and he started getting involved with this railroad and he realized that someday these are going to need to merge and about 1900 they tried to merge these two railroads along with the Chicago Burlington and Quincy and one other that I can't remember off the top of my head but it's in the video.

The government wouldn't let them do it.

It's an anti-trust but they kept at it.

It makes business sense.

So by 1970 they were able to merge these railroads into the Burlington Northern and then several years later they merged with the Santa Fe to be the BNSF and there are some, depending on how you count, 4 or 500 railroads that have been merged and merged and merged to be the BNSF.

Now people have watched this video and you know roughly how many how do you know that?

Well it's on the Lakeland YouTube page and you can see how many views there are.

And how many are there?

Well a few weeks ago there were 62,000 and two weeks later there's 64,000.

Wow.

So these are people from really all around the country, right, looking at YouTube.

The wonder of YouTube is you could watch them from England.

Yeah actually so that's, yeah that internet works all over the place, all over the place.

So that was a great project.

And your company's name what you call it?

Easy Street Productions.

Yeah and tell me what are you doing now, what have you got in the future plans?

I want to do more grant funded projects that maybe don't have deadlines, and I like history, I like telling stories.

That really sparks me.

Doing this NP film, it took me, I don't even want to think about the hours, but I don't care.

But I was almost sad when it ended because I enjoyed doing it so much.

I met rail fans.

Now there are people who will drive many miles to look at trains and I've become one of them and they're an interesting group and I want to do a little video about rail fans there and without making fun of them.

They're just an interesting group of folks.

Kevin Costner, the movie star, is a railroad fan.

He has a property in Deadwood okay and he's a bell collector and there is a bell collection in Staples, a very sophisticated bell collection.

I don't know if the person wants to show them around now but yeah we know stuff.

There's some really amazing, those brass bells, that came off the locomotives.

Yeah that's pretty cool.

Also, oxcarts, that's what preceded trains here in Minnesota.

There were boats on the rivers of course but where there weren't rivers you need to haul stuff.

Oxcarts, they came through Brainerd.

Crow Wing State Park was a crossing of the river and not many people know about this.

These several decades where they hauled things from St Paul to eventually Winnipeg via oxcart.

So I've got some people lined up and we're going to talk to Meghan here about getting some grant funding for this because this is a significant part of Minnesota history.

You still see signs on the highways, the oxcart trail.

well what who are these people?

What was life like and what do they haul and got a million questions.

I want to tell that.

There was an incident here in Brainerd that ended up being called the Blueberry War.

Part of it was a lynching of a couple Native American folks and there is so much more to the story I can't even begin to go into it here, but I'm working with Jeremy Jackson, who's one of my experts in the NP film and he's writing a book about the Blueberry War and I'm going to work with Jeremy on making that video.

So we're, it's down the road, and we'll figure out how to do it.

Very interesting.

It's kind of sad isn't it to see all the railroad tracks that we've lost that were developed at one time.

You know at one time it was the way to move, but things changed.

It was very effective, efficient, incredible much more so than some of the ways we're doing it now.

Til you had a train nobody had gone faster than a horse could run.

Yeah it was just shocking how fast they went.

Yeah, and there's still some remnants of the trains in Brainerd.

Yeah and there's still a few remnants of some things over in Staples.

Yep.

And how about in the Fargo area, is there anything over in that area?

You know there's several railroads that do run through there, they've been merged and merged, of course, but yeah if you want to, if you want to see trains Fargo- Morehead is a good place to go.

Do we have time to talk about the logo?

How much?

Yeah you got a couple minutes here.

People always ask about the logo.

There it is on my hat.

In a bit of trivia it says Northern Pacific Railway.

It was railroad before the second bankruptcy in the 1880s, and they decided to change the name to railway after the 1880s.

There's a bit of trivia for you.

Where does that logo come from?

And it, we know it as the ying yang, which is a Chinese thing.

You'll see it on the Korean flag.

This is different in that it doesn't have a dot.

Yin yang would have a dot of the yin and the yang and a dot of the yang in the yin because nothing is totally anything.

But it shows the duality of things and male/female, light/dark, you know, and so forth.

One of the directors of the Northern Pacific was at the Colombian Exposition in 1892.

Again Christopher Columbus comes in.

They were celebrating the 400th anniversary of this Colombian Exposition 1892 in Chicago.

He was there, he saw the Korean Pavilion, he saw their logo, their flag and he just loved it and he brought it back and they made the NP logo out of it and people assume it has deep meaning because the yin yang has a deep meaning.

This is called the monad and they just said it's a symbol of good railroading.

They just like the look of it.

Very cool.

So how do people find your video?

Well you go to Lakeland, lptv, website and click on the documentaries tab.

I didn't want to own this thing, I don't want to sell DVDs, I just want it out there and it's free to the world forever.

Wow.

Well thank you for doing that.

Thank you for coming on the program.

It's great to see you again and we'll be watching your future productions.

All right, thanks.

I'm Ray Gildow.

You've been watching Lakeland Currents.

We'll see you next time.